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Organising a conference in Cuba is new territory for us. We are working closely with great partners on the ground in Havana and the Irish Embassy in Mexico City. The conference venue is located in the historic centre of Old Havana or Havana Vieja. All of the panels and round tables will take place in the Palacio Segundo Cabo and the larger plenary and public events will move to el Colegio Universitario San Geronimo just a block away.

The timing of the conference coincides with the first Irish presidential visit to Cuba.

As part of the programme for the official visit we envisage that Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland and the Patron of SILAS will give the keynote address.

The annual Havana International Book Fair runs from 14-19 February. The Irish Embassy has invited a number of Irish writers to the event and they have very kindly agreed to participate in the SILAS conference.

We are delighted to announce that the next conference of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies will take place in Havana, Cuba. The Conference will be co-hosted by the Oficina del Historiador de La Habana and the Colegio Universitario de San Gerónimo on February 16-18, 2017. This follows the very successful SILAS conference at University College Cork, Ireland, in 2015.

The conference seeks to bring together scholars from across disciplines who are interested in connections between Ireland, Cuba, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Iberian Peninsula. We invite individual proposals for twenty-minute presentations (papers/posters) or for panels of three people exploring a similar theme.

The following themes are suggested:

Island Peoples and their Diasporas

The Atlantic Space

Revolutions, Imperialisms

Comparative Colonialisms

Migrations, Immigrations

Exile, Safe Haven

Gender, Sexuality

Class, Race, Ethnicity

Minorities, Creolizations

Discord, Reconciliations

Passages and Crossings

Ocean Traffic

Traveling Cultures and Languages

Music, Film, Literature

Food, Sport

Religion, Beliefs, Subcultures

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by August 30 to the SILAS Conference Academic Planning Committee, at this email address silascuba2017@csub.edu

Panel proposals should include descriptions of the panel (of no more than 150 words) and should be accompanied by 250-word abstracts. Likewise, poster proposal abstracts should be of no more than 250 words. All proposals should be accompanied by a brief bio or one-page CV. Individuals should not submit more than one proposal for a panel, paper or poster. Decisions will be made by September 30. Both English and Spanish-language presentations will be considered.

Ireland’s long war for independence from 1912 to 1922 reverberated internationally and echoed down through the years in Irish relations with the Global South. In particular, it spoke to a tradition of political and cultural radicalism that moved beneath the surface of Latin American republics. Links and reciprocities between Ireland and Latin America are multiple and diverse. With the recent surge of work on Irish-Latin American connections and several significant literary interventions, the extent of these links is ever clearer. In this commemorative year, it is time to venture further into those contact zones and hidden recesses of cultural exchange.

This special issue of Irish Migration Studies in Latin America focuses on the revolutionary decade between 1912 and 1922. We seek to explore connections, collaborations, and intellectual and cultural synergies fusing Irish, South American and Caribbean contexts and temporalities during these turbulent years – between the signing of the Home Rule Bill and the end of the Irish Civil War. We also wish to examine the subsequent legacy of commemoration and remembrance in official events, anti-state activism, and in fiction and non-fiction.

We welcome essays from a variety of disciplines that will deepen understanding of the experience of Irish-Latin American relations and throw interdisciplinary light on both the practical and imaginative connections between Ireland and South America. We also welcome articles or reviews of events and interventions that take place during this commemorative year.

In addition to essays on historical themes, literary texts or cultural artefacts, contributions on any of the following would be welcome:

It is hoped that the edition will have contributions from different media platforms. Essays should be in the region of 5,000 words although longer essays that consider specific controversies and issues are welcome. Consideration will also be given to publication of digitised documents and archival material that address the theme and might provide valuable source material for future research.

Irish Caribbean Connections is an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to explore synergies between Ireland and the Caribbean islands. This event follows the vibrant Caribbean Irish Connections conference held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 2012.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

LORNA GOODISON

INTRODUCED BY JAHAN RAMAZANI

We welcome proposals for papers across the range of disciplines, including but not confined to the following areas:

Abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers should be emailed to Lee Jenkins at l.jenkins@ucc.ie by 31st March 2016.

Irish-Caribbean Connections takes place just before the 2016 conference of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature), to be held at University College Cork on 25-29 July. For details, visit http://iasil2016.com/

Irish-Caribbean Connections is supported by the University College Cork Strategic Research Fund

Brazilian students interested in pursuing an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, should apply for the 2016 Maria Helena Kopschitz Scholarship. The scholarship includes full tuition for the one year program and money for accommodation. Travel funds are available as well.For further information and to apply, visit the announcement at UCD’s website: http://www.ucd.ie/englishanddrama/news/sedfnewstitle,255237,en.html

We are pleased to announce that the official conference website for the Fifth SILAS conference, at University College Cork, Ireland, 25-27 June 2015, with information on registration, accommodation, directions, and more is available at http://silasucc2015.org/wp/

“It has been argued that the crucible of modernity was not so much in the Western metropolis as in the encounter of the metropolitan countries with other parts of the world, especially through the development of colonialism and capitalism. The consolidation of the Argentinian republic, as indeed all of the American republics, took place in part through the destruction of the indigenous peoples, opening their lands to colonization, while the 16th and 17th century English often compared the native Irish to the American indigenes and proposed their extirpation (though there are indeed obvious limits to this comparison). A periphery implies a center, yet how can we understand European nationalism without understanding the creole variety – as Benedict Anderson calls it – that preceded it, revolting against metropolitan rule in the Americas? Atlantic history in the age of revolution can draw obvious parallels, for example, between San Martín, who led Argentina’s struggle for independence, and someone like Wolfe Tone, both ‘creoles’ revolting against the metropolis, the land of their ancestors, and both influenced by the earlier revolutions of North America and France.

Argentina was a center, one of the richest countries in the world until the 1950s, a magnet – second only to the USA – for millions of European emigrants (including thousands from Ireland, whose descendants form the largest Irish community outside of the English-speaking world). While Ireland exported people, Argentina imported them (though for a period in the first decade of the new millennium, the roles were reversed). But Argentina, which represented the future for millions of emigrants, was also a capitalist periphery. Its uneven modernity is the basis for what Beatriz Sarlo has called Buenos Aires’ ‘modernidad periférica’. Something similar can be observed between the provincial stagnation of Dublin, a largely pre-industrial town, and the sophisticated literary production of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. How can we characterize a Borges or a Joyce as ‘a master on the periphery of capitalism’, as Roberto Schwarz did of the great Brazilian writer Machado de Assis? What is the relationship between capitalism and modernism? The creation of a national culture was a key project in both countries, and what Joep Leerssen has called ‘auto-exoticism’ played an important role. The genre of the gauchesco, which used the language typical of the gauchos, the most authentic of creoles, was a response of Argentinian urban intellectuals at around the same time as the Cultural Revival in Ireland sought cultural authenticity in the Irish-speaking peasant.

To bring the Irish Seminar to Buenos Aires is to seek to answer urgent questions about Irish Studies in a non-Anglophone and a global context. Our project is not comparative for its own sake, but seeks to ask new questions about Ireland and Irish Studies in the world by looking at parallels with Argentina (and indeed with Latin American Studies). We also wish to explore aspects of the Irish experience specific to Argentina – Irish emigration to the region, the Irish community there, the reception of Irish literature in this part of the southern hemisphere. We hope that our stay in this dynamic and sophisticated metropolis will challenge our notion of Irish Studies.